Encounter in the Interstellar Night
by Bineshii
Summary: This is a vignette about the Enterprise coming to the aid of a lone ship in space. Trip Tucker and Phlox go in a shuttle pod to investigate why the ship does not answer a hail from the Enterprise.


Encounter in the Interstellar Night

By Bineshii

The utter loneliness of it saddened the Enterprise crew as they gazed out the view ports at it hanging there in space. "It must be an incomprehensible distance from any friendly aid, a forlorn little ship" was the way the captain described it.

That's why they had to do something about it. It was a human thing, as Captain Archer had once told T'Pol, to investigate a ship that was just sitting there in space, not answering a hail. She understood the logic of that now, the human logic. She kept the Vulcan view of privacy to herself as she monitored the shuttle pod's progress toward yet another immobile alien vessel encountered in the vast emptiness of interstellar space.

The away team, this time just Trip and Phlox, scanned the shimmering blue-green hull in the beam of the shuttle pod's spotlight. Trip wondered what the skin of this ship was made of. Phlox wondered who was inside that hull.

On the second circle of the vessel, which was a quarter of the size of _Enterprise,_ they found a hatch. The shuttle pod's hatch overwhelmed it like a large round mouth over an hexagonal one, metal clanging up against metal. Trip applied a resin seal to fill in around the gaps between the curve of the alien hull and the shuttle pod's flat hatch configuration.

It was easier than they expected, opening the inner hatch in their bulky EVA suits, ignoring what was most likely a set of compression controls. A whoosh of alien atmosphere buffeted them as they moved heavily through the inner hatch into a companionway. What were probably emergency lights, glowed faintly, outlining the walkway. They met no one until with some kind of engineer's instinct, Trip found the engine room. Upon shoving a large hexagonal sliding door open, they found the remains of some of the alien crew.

The engine room crew, seemingly asleep at their stations was eerie, disturbing. Trip gently lowered an alien body to the deck so he could sit at a set of controls. The patterns of pulsing lines told him more than the alien script could. Maybe they should have brought Hoshi along. He identified various systems almost by instinct. Yet as he worked to comprehend the ship, one by one, motifs dropped out of the symphony of ship's sounds and vibrations.

Phlox came into Trip's range of vision and slowly shook his head. These unfortunate creatures were beyond his aid. An accident most likely, since the mix of gases in the air of the engine room differed from the mixture deep in the lungs of these creatures. A leak undetected until it was too late and they all suffocated? That was the most likely scenario. There was nothing more for him to do, so he watched the screens over Trip's shoulder, where undulating lines were going flat, spikes on read outs dropping, fading, and screens were going dim, then black. Phlox's patients were already dead, and it looked like Trip's patient was dying too.

Trip spread his fingers and placed his hands flat on the console in front of him. Then he turned to Phlox and echoed the doctor's headshake of a half hour ago. Silence screamed throughout the hull, down the companionways, and out of the dark consoles in the engine room. The ship was dead. Dead and far from home.

Both of them checked each other to see that their helmets were still locked in place. Their steps bounced in the fading gravity as they left the engine room, bodies rising in a macabre dance around them. Hurriedly, they climbed a ladder and found their way to the companionway with the hatch. They passed through the hatch, turning to take one last look at the interior of this still unidentified vessel.

On the return ride, Phlox bent as close as he could to the padd as his chair's restraining harness would allow. This would not be a long report, the photos longer than the text anyway. For this was just another unidentified alien vessel, a little bubble of home world atmosphere and gravity contained in a thin metal skin. The ending was quite typical for a group of sentient beings whose curiosity and daring exceeded their survival abilities.

This report would most likely be filed and forgotten. Perhaps two hundred years from now, a clerk restructuring a database might come across it and bring it to the attention of a supervisor: "Sir, take a look at this. I think we are going to have to move the first contact date with the _X_----rians back a bit." And the report would be passed on to the _X_----rians who would go to the coordinates and retrieve their long-lost ship; identify the remains, for anyone who still might care. The clerk might care, if he got a pat on the back for closing out this case. Phlox continued to reflect on the little ship as he stuffed the padd in his uniform's breast pocket and watched Trip expertly dock the shuttle pod.

For Trip, it was good to be off that ship after the engine went cold and silent. Good to return to the helm of a live shuttle pod. And even better to be back aboard the living, breathing _Enterprise._


End file.
